Luna
Page 40
The Taiyang plan is child-like in its straightforwardness. Lucas has time to think about it in his capsule and he deduced it in instants from Amanda’s confession. Never confess. That’s a mistake he will repay three times. She never esteemed him. The Suns always treated the Cortas as a lesser, dirty class. Ludicrous gauchos. Jumped-up favelados. Mackenzie Metals destroys Corta Hélio. Planet Earth watches and fears for its helium fusion plants. Mackenzie Metals has a helium-3 stockpile from its attempts to muscle into Corta Hélio’s market but the long game lies in Taiyang’s exercising its long-bet options on the equatorial belt. Pave the moon’s equator sixty kilometres on either side of Equatorial One with solar panels sintered from lunar regolith and beam the power to Earth by microwave. Taiyang has always been information and power. The moon as nondepletable permanent orbital power station. It is humanity’s most expensive and largest infrastructure program but in the paranoia following the fall of Corta Hélio and the shrinking of the lunar helium-3 supply, investors will stab each other in the throat to bang cash on Taiyang’s table. It will be the Sun’s final victory in their long war with the PRC. It’s a magnificent plan. Lucas admires it nakedly.
Its magnificence is its simplicity. Set a few simple motivators working and human pride will do the rest. The assassin fly was brilliant; a simple obfuscation that cast shadows between the Cortas and Asamoahs but pointed to the Mackenzies. Lucas has no doubt that the software malfunction that killed Rachel Mackenzie was sourced in a Taiyang server; or that the knife attack that disabled Ariel came out of the Palace of Eternal Light. Little triggers. Feedback loops. Cycles of violence. Conspire for your enemies to destroy each other. How long had the Suns been scheming? They worked in decades, planned for centuries.
It’s far too easy when you can predict your enemy’s next move, Amanda had said. Wagner had mentioned, Ariel had confirmed, that Taiyang had designed a quantum computing system for Whitacre Goddard. The Three August Ones. Highly accurate predictions from detailed real-world modelling. What serves Whitacre Goddard serves the Suns better.
They had not predicted Lucas would survive.
Toquinho powers up, a low-rez basic interface that allows Lucas to mesh with the capsule’s sensors and control systems. The capsule has pinged, and the destination has pinged back. It was all calculation. Out there, close to the far end of its loop around the back of the moon into its return orbit to Earth, VTO cycler Saints Peter and Paul has locked on to the capsule and assumed control. Lucas’s tie falls as the capsule jerks to micro-accelerations; thrusters burping to push it into a rendezvous orbit. Now the cycler is within range of the capsules’ cameras and Toquinho shows him the breath-taking sight of the sun-lit ship: five habitat rings arranged up and down the central drive and life support axle, a crown of soar panels.
Ten million in Zurich gold will buy Lucas sanctuary here, for as long as he needs to calculate out his return and revenge.
Thrusters pop and belch, docking arms reach out to grasp the capsule and draw Lucas Corta in.
The moonship comes in low over the debris field. The ejecta of Boa Vista has fallen in a rough disc five kilometres across, graded by size and weight. The lighter material – the leaves, the grass clippings – forms the outer rings; then the glass shards, the pieces of metal and stone and sinter. The largest and heaviest items, the most intact ones, lie closest to the wreckage of the lock. The pilot brings her ship in manually, hunting for a safe landing zone. She plays the manoeuvring thrusters like a musical instrument: ship-dancing.
In the surface activity pod, Lucasinho Corta, Abena and Lousika Asamoah suit up with the VTO rescue team and the AKA security squad. There has been no sign of activity from Boa Vista for two hours now, except the pulse of the refuge beacon. Refuges are tough but the destruction of Boa Vista is well beyond design parameters. Green lights. The ship is down. The pod depressurises. Lucasinho and Abena bump helmets, a recognition of friendship and the anticipation of fear. Familiars collapse down into name tags over their left shoulders.
VTO had protested that diverting to Twé to pick up Lousika Asamoah would add perilous minutes to their rescue mission. ‘My girl is down there.’ VTO had still demurred. ‘AKA will pay for your extra fuel, time and air.’ That had settled it. ‘There will be three of us.’
Pod depressurised, Jinji says. Doors opening.
Abena squeezes Lucasinho’s hand.
Lucasinho has never flown in a moonship. He anticipated excitement: rushing over the surface faster than he ever travelled before, rocket-powered, riding to the rescue. His experience was a seat in a windowless pod, a series of unpredictable jolts and thumps and accelerations that threw him against his restraint harness and much time to imagine what he would find down there.
The VTO rescue squad strike through the debris field to the lock. They rig winch tripods and lights. Lousika, with Abena and Lucasinho and her guards, descend the ramp to the surface. The moonship’s searchlights cast long, slow-moving shadows of warped garden furniture, twisted construction beams, shards of reinforced glass stabbed into the regolith, smashed machinery. Lucasinho and Abena pick a path through the wreckage.
‘Nana.’
Lousika’s guards have found something. Their helmet lights play across tweed, the curve of a shoulder, a hank of hair.
‘Stay there, Lucasinho,’ Lousika orders.
‘I want to see him,’ Lucasinho says.
‘Stay there!’
Two guards seize him, turn him away. Lucasinho tries to wrench free but these are fresh workers six months up from Accra and they outmuscle any third gen moon-boy. Abena stands in front of him.
‘Look at me.’
‘I want to see him!’
‘Look at me!’
Lucasinho turns his head. He glimpses Lousika on her knees on the regolith. Her hands are pressed to her faceplate, she rocks back and forth. He glimpses something smashed and distorted, burst open and freeze-dried to leather. Then Abena claps her hands on either side of his helmet and turns his head to her. Lucasinho returns the gesture. He pulls Abena’s helmet to touch his, a duster kiss.
‘I will never ever forgive the people who did this,’ Lucasinho swears on a private channel. ‘Robert Mackenzie, Duncan Mackenzie, Bryce MacKenzie, I name you and claim you. I put down a marker. You’re mine.’
‘Lucasinho, don’t say this.’
‘You don’t tell me that, Abena. This is mine, you don’t have a say in it.’
‘Lucasinho …’
‘This is mine.’
‘Ms Asamoah-Corta.’
Lousika starts at the call on the common channel from the VTO rescue squad.
‘We’re ready.’
She rests a hand on Lucasinho’s shoulder. Sasuit haptics communicate the nap of the terrain, the touch of a hand.
‘Luca, it will kill you.’
He only caught a glimpse; he was not allowed to see what Lousika saw; his uncle, her oko; but what he did see he will never stop seeing.
‘Nana, they’re waiting for us,’ says one of the guards. She carefully steers Lucasinho to keep his back turned to the dead thing. The moon kills ugly.
The Vorontsov team hook first Lousika, then Lucasinho, last Abena to the winches. Lucasinho swings out over the black gullet of the lock shaft. He glances down, his helmet beams splash around the wall of the pit. The enormous blast of Boa Vista’s depressurisation has scoured the shaft clean of anything that might snag and tear a sasuit. Still, it is a descent into dread and darkness. The refuge has been beaconing constantly but it could have shifted, become jammed, failed, ruptured.
‘Lowering.’
It must have been likewise when Adriana first descended into the lava tube she would sculpt into her palace. Light on rock, the vibration of the winch through the drop line. You came up this when you stormed out on your pai, Lucasinho thinks and feels a brief burn of embarrassment. How differently you make the return trip.
Then Lucasinho’s proximity sensors beep and his feet touch down. Crunch
and texture of wreckage under his boots. He unsnaps the harness and steps out into Boa Vista. The Vorontsov team has rigged working lights; they hint at more than they reveal: dark shadows in the eye sockets of Xango. Pavilions fallen and strewn like unsuccessful card tricks. Leafless trees, frozen to their hearts, eerily underlit. The full, sensual lips of Iansa. Hints and glints of ice: the frozen tears of the orixas; Lucasinho’s helmet beams playing across dead lawns rigid with frost, lenses of black ice in the dry pools and watercourses. What water wasn’t blown away in the DP has flash frozen in a frosted glaze.
Lucasinho blunders into a lost object and sends it skidding across the tiled pavement. His helmet beams locate it: the wreckage of the old Corta Hélio board table; cracked, missing a leg. He sets it upright. It keels over immediately. Through broken door frames and smashed chairs, under trees draped in shredded bedding. His boots crunch vacuum-frozen twigs and crumbs of glass. Not a pavilion stands. He plays his helmet lights across the faces of the orixas. Oxala, Lord of Light. Yemanja the Creator. Xango the Just. Oxum the Lover. Ogun the Warrior. Oxossi the Hunter. Ibeji the Twins. Omolu, Lord of Disease. Iansa, Queen of Change. Nana the Source.
He never believed in any of them.
‘I will bring this back,’ he whispers in Portuguese. ‘This is mine.’
A second pair of helmet beams strike out and fix him in a pool of light, a third: Lousika and Abena have arrived, but he walks ahead of them, down the dead river bed between the orixas, down to where the rescuers are waiting.
Glossary
Many languages are spoken on the moon and the vocabulary cheerfully borrows words from Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Yoruba, Spanish, Arabic, Akan.
Abusua: Group of people who share a common maternal ancestor. AKA maintains them and their marriage taboos to preserve genetic diversity
Adinkra: Akan visual symbols that represent concepts or aphorisms
Agbada: Yoruba formal robe
Amor: Lover/partner
Anzinho: Little angel
Apatoo: Spirit of dissension
Banya: Russian sauna and steam bath
Berçário: Nursery
Bu-hwaejang: Korean corporate title: vice-chair. See also, hwaejang, jonmu
Caçador: Hunter
Chib: A small virtual pane in an interactive contact lens that shows the state of an individual’s accounts for the Four Elementals
Choego: Korean corporate title: Foremost
Churrasceria: Brazilian/Argentinian barbecue
Coracão: My heart. A term of endearment
CPD: Social identity number in Brazil, necessary for a number of important social and financial transactions
Craque: Sports superstar
Escolta: Bodyguard
Four Elementals: Air, water, carbon and data: the basic commodities of lunar existence, paid for daily by the chib system
Gaye Nyame: Adinkra symbol meaning ‘Except God, (I fear None)’
Globo: a simplified form of English with a codified pronunciation comprehensible by machines
Gupshup: The main gossip channel on the lunar social network
Hwaejang: Korean corporate title: President
Irmã/Irmão: Sister/brother
Jo/Joe Moonbeam: new arrival on the moon
Jonmu: Korean Corporate title: Managing Director
Keji-oko: Second spouse
Kotoko: AKA council, of rotating memberships
Kuozhao: Dust-mask
Ladeiro: A staircase from one level of a quadra to another
Madrinha: Surrogate mother, literally ‘Godmother’
Malandragem: The art of the trickster, bad-assery
Mamãe/Mae, Papai/pai: Mother/Mum, Father/Dad
Manhua: Chinese manga
Miudo: Kid
Moto: Three-wheel automated cab
Nana: Ashanti term of respect to an elder
Nikah: A marriage contract. The term comes from Arabic
Norte: A person from North America
Oheneba: ‘Little Princess’ – term of endearment
Oko: Spouse in marriage
Omahene: CEO of AKA, on an eight-year cycle rotation
Onyame: One name for a Supreme being in Akan traditional religion
Orixa: Deities and saints in the syncretistic Afro-Brazilian umbanda religion
Patrão: Godfather
Sasuit: Surface Activity suit
Saudade: Melancholy. Sweet melancholy is a sophisticated and essential element on bossa nova music
Shibari: Japanese rope bondage
Ser: Form of address used to a neutro
Siririca: Brazilian slang for female masturbation
Terreiro: An Umbanda temple
Tia/Tio: Aunt/uncle
Yin: Digital signature
Zabbaleen: Freelance organics recyclers, who then sell on to the LDC which owns all organic material
Zashitnik: A hired fighter in trial by combat: literally defender, advocate
Hawaiian Calendar
Lunar society has adopted the Hawaiian system of naming each day of the lune (a lunar month) after a different moon-phase. Thus the lune has 30 days and no weeks.
1: Hilo
2: Hoaka
3: Ku Kahi
4: Ku Lua
5: Ku Kolu
6: Ku Pau
7: Ole Ku Kahi
8: Ole Ku Lua
9: Ole Ku Kolu
10: Ole Ku Pau
11: Huna
12: Mohalu
13: Hua
14: Akua
15: Hoku
16: Mahealani
17: Kulua
18: Lā’au Kū Kahi
19: Lā’au Kuū Lua
20: Lā’au Pau
21: ’Ole Kū Kahi
22: ’Ole Kū Lua
23: ’Ole Pau
24: Kāloa Kū Kahi
25: Kāloa Kū Lua
26: Kāloa Pau
27: Kāne
28: Lono
29: Mauli
30: Muku
About the Author
IAN MCDONALD was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish fther. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He has won the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He now lives in Belfast. You can sign up for author updates here.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Luna: Character List
Near Side of the Moon
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
Glossary
Hawaiian Calendar
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LUNA: NEW MOON
Copyright © 2015 by Ian McDonald
All rights reserved
Map copyright © Dave Senior
A Tor Book
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e-ISBN: 978-1-4668-4763-7
First published in Great Britain by Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, an Hachette UK Company
First U.S. Edition: September 2015